Robert Bresson's final feature is yet another of his cold examinations of the inescapable venality
of human relations; for a man noted for inspirational works that examine man's relation with his
spiritual instincts, this is one pessimistic filmmaker. Bresson uses a short story from Tolstoy
to launch meditation on the evil that men do.

Synopsis:

Owing money to his school friends, a boy passes a counterfeit note in a photography
studio. The storekeeper decides to pass it on to an innocent deliveryman Yvon Targe (Christian
Patey), and when he's arrested, the storekeeper and his two sales associates deny the transaction
ever took place. Disgusted, Yvon takes part in a crime and is sent to jail for three years, leading
to the end of his family. One of the sales associates in the photography studio contemptuously robs
the storekeeper after being dismissed for petty theft, and ends up in the same prison as Yvon. By
the time Yvon comes out of jail, he no longer has any respect for human life.

L'Argent begins as if it will be a movie with a La ronde structure, where a weapon or
a suit of clothes (Tales of Manhattan) changes the fortunes of those who inherit it. A
counterfeit bill is passed about, leaving a wake of corruption wherever it goes. But this
faux banknote changes hands only twice before Bresson's script stops to note the moral
decay among all who come in contact with it.

A schoolboy learns that his parents will cover for his crime and that he can sneer at the woman
he's cheated. The first wronged party sees nothing wrong with passing off his problem onto an
innocent third party, whose reputation he destroys. A store clerk with rebellious instincts will
see in his employer's selfishness the motive to commit a much larger crime.

Worst of all, a decent family is utterly destroyed. The delivery man Yvon is too proud to defend
himself to his employers and turns to crime as well. His wife and child are left vulnerable, and
the injustice turns him into a mass murderer.

Bresson's simple approach to his material reduces the drama to a series of arrivals and departures,
doors and barriers, messages, letters refused and legal summons. Everything is observed at a slight
distance imposed by a narrow lens; it's as if we were observing the actions of microbes in a
laboratory. The acting is muted and undemonstrative. Ellipsis is used to skip major events and
important action often happens just off-screen: A showdown during a robbery, a prison escape only
heard through a cell door. We're invited to judge what we see but to keep our emotions at a slight
remove. The savagery of a concluding bloodbath is only hinted at by several short cuts of murderous
details and shivering victims.

We follow Bresson's narrative but I'm not sure we agree with his general thesis. The movie's title
and key artwork (on the disc cover) stress that money is root of all this evil, when it simply seems
that Bresson has chosen a rotten group of people. In the human chain we see nobody who does anything
except for immediate personal expediency. Parents are thoughtless about their children except when
it comes to quickly covering up their mistakes. The money hardly seems the issue, as these people
were surely behaving badly long before the counterfeit money started moving. The shopkeeper is a
crook and his dishonest employee obviously had an entire philosophy of criminal anarchy in place
before the film began. Our upstanding victim, the delivery man Yvon, already has criminal
acquaintances. Man, not money, is the root of all evil and L'Argent deals only with
consequences and not roots.

What's really happening in L'Argent is that immorality flows between humans like ripples on
a pond. Unable to recover his loss, the first thing a victim of cheating wants to to is pass the
loss to someone else. The employee thinks that if his boss cheats, he should be able to. Yvon reasons
that if his reputation is damaged, he has the right to live up to his new label as a thief. Where
the dominoes break down is the idea that a wronged, hurt man locked in prison will turn into a
conscienceless mass murderer as a philosophical reaction. This reviewer doesn't believe that crime
works that way. If the events that befall Yvon (and he has nobody to blame but himself for some of
them) push him over the edge into insanity, he must have been teetering on the brink anyway.

It's tempting to reject the thesis of L'Argent based on its unrelieved pessimism. The only
positive influence is the wise counsel of Yvon's cellmate, who tries to get him to give up ideas of
revenge. But besides that we scarcely see anyone behaving with love or even kindness to each other.
Yvon's suffering wife has little contact with her husband. Yvon never gets the chance to tell his
entire story to a single sympathetic ear. Life can be bleak but Bresson wants to blot out the
possibility of goodness, as indicated by his abrupt, frustratingly downbeat ending.

The liner notes of Kent Jones say that Bresson's next movie, had he lived was to be called
La belle vie, and speculates that it was perhaps to be a positive rebuttal to this film's
darkness ... unless the title was meant to be ironic.

New Yorker Video's DVD of L'Argent is an excellent enhanced transfer of Bresson's film with
very good color. The complex soundtrack makes much use of street ambience and traffic noise.

The extras are quite thorough. Kent Jones' commentary examines Bresson's style and unusual approach
to filmmaking. Two French television interviews with the director at the time of the film's debut
in 1983 show him to be articulate on the subject of his technique but not prone to analyze his own
work. A videotaped piece with writer Marguerite Duras is little more than a couple of sentences of
aesthetic endorsement. The trailer doesn't bother to sell this austere artwork as commercial fare.
1

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,L'Argentrates:Movie: Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Audio commentary by Kent Jones; A video clip of writer Marguerite
Duras speaking about Robert Bresson; Two video interviews with Bresson taped at the time of
the 1983 Cannes Film Festival; TrailerPackaging: Keep case
Reviewed: May 2, 2005

Footnotes:

1.Savant note,
6/3/05:I've received an impressive note defending L'Argent and suggesting that my
lack of enthusiasm for it is due to my unfamiliarity with the director. This is the fourth Bresson
movie I've seen and I'm eager to agree, if only to partially excuse my underdeveloped
opinion. Any reviewer reads like a self-appointed expert; it sometimes feels absurd to toss one's
opinion up against decades of thoughtful insight by better-read critics - not that Savant has graduated
from the status of reviewer to critic. It would be dishonest of me to say that L'Argent
will be a great experience, but we're supposed to separate the good stuff from the chaff and the
reader is right that I conclude too quickly that the movie is deficient. It's that way with a lot
of art films - one sometimes has to read the literature to understand that the film is teaching one
a different way to see. Savant is read by a number of
truly well-read cinephiles who are obviously going to know more about many films than I do. I still try
to write them as I see them. I figure that those who really care will know my taste and realign it
with their own accordingly. That's the message - I don't want viewers that see L'Argent as
holy ground to think I don't care, even if it didn't reach me. Return